HISTORY is filled with tales of powerful men who accumulate titles the way some people collect travel fridge magnets. They begin with one respectable office, add a second for convenience, a third in the name of ‘stability’, and then, before anyone realises, they end up wearing more metaphorical hats than a sturdy neck can bear.
For instance, Napoleon Bonaparte began as a general, then made himself the first consul, then consul for life and then crowned himself emperor. The scene is unforgettable: Napoleon takes the crown from the Pope’s hands and places it on his own head, as if even divine authority needed streamlining. His appetite for responsibilities ballooned so dramatically that one imagines he viewed France not as a country but as a set of personal drawers only he could manage. What lay beneath this obsession was the idea that only he could do it right.
Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Broz Tito on the other hand adopted a more discreet but equally expansive strategy. He accumulated roles — president, prime minister, supreme commander, chairman of the League of Communists, so much so that the line between Tito and the state blurred beyond recognition. Even the most capable ministers, generals, or party secretaries existed as accessories, not actors. When a leader insists on wearing every hat, it signals that he does not trust anyone else to wear even one.
Take Uganda’s Idi Amin — he turned the appropriation of fancy hats and titles into an art. His self-bestowed titles included: ‘Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea’, ‘conqueror of the British Empire’ and even ‘King of Scotland’. Amin’s unfolding list of titles served less as a job description and more as a loud declaration that it was institutional cannibalism disguised as grandeur.
Napoleon viewed France not so much as a country but as a set of personal drawers.
Comrade Josef Stalin took a quieter route. His official title ‘general secretary’ sounded bureaucratically modest, as though he supervised filing cabinets. Yet he controlled the sprawling Soviet state with microscopic precision. Stalin’s soft-spoken title concealed a belief that only he understood the ideological, military, economic, and agricultural direction of an empire spread over multiple time zones. The problem is that when leaders are convinced that nobody else can possibly be trusted, institutions don’t grow, they shrink.
Colonel Muammar Qadhafi was no different. He perfected the paradox by claiming he held no titles. Having abolished formal offices, he ruled Libya through an elastic, personal authority that superseded every institution. His ‘I don’t need a title’ posture was simply another hat, one larger than conventional ones. Beneath this rejection of formal structure was the unmistakable assumption that institutions and people who operated within them were too incompetent to function without his constant, invisible hand guiding every lever of power. He did not delegate because to him there was no one worth delegating to.
This phenomenon is not new. Even the mighty Roman emperors doubled as high priests, supreme judges, military commanders and heads of civil administration. Mediaeval kings routinely absorbed roles across religion, warfare, finance, and justice. All this ceremonial splendour was a cover for the age-old belief that their junior officials were unreliable, deputies weak, and institutions potential threats rather than structures to build.
The comedic tragedy of this global pattern is that leaders who hoard hats rarely admit the real reason. Publicly, they claim they are consolidating power for efficiency, stability, and cohesion, but deep down many believe that no one is capable enough to replace them. This can impede institutions’ growth. When a leader thinks no one else can be trusted, no one else learns, no one else leads, and no one else becomes capable. Entities become shells waiting for instructions from those too busy adjusting a stack of hats to notice them.
This, more than anything, is why history’s great hat-wearers have rarely left behind strong systems. They have left behind systems that collapse the moment they depart. When power gathers around a single neck, every institution beneath it weakens through the lack of use, lack of trust, and lack of responsibility. The system becomes fragile, propped as it is by one person’s stamina rather than the collective strength of competent teams.
Yet one never learns the universal lesson, that one hat is dignified, two hats are manageable, but no neck is strong enough to support one hat too many. There will always be another chorus insisting that distributing power is dangerous but concentrating it in one person is safe. And history, unsurprised, watches as the cycle repeats itself.
The writer is a lawyer.
Published in Dawn, December 18th, 2025